


out of the darkness

by nicheinhischest



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-16
Updated: 2013-07-16
Packaged: 2017-12-20 08:46:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/885299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicheinhischest/pseuds/nicheinhischest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It feels like they’re fighting a losing battle, like it’s always been a losing battle, and it never stops coming. And the things Scott’s constantly fighting all seem to want the same end result: for everyone he knows to turn to dust and disappear like they never existed in the first place. </p><p>Isaac mumbles something and Scott turns his head, murmurs <i>what</i> into his neck; he breathes in just because he can, nose right under the cut of Isaac’s jaw.</p><p>“I said, what’re we going to do now?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	out of the darkness

**Author's Note:**

> **MAJOR spoilers for S03E07, brief mention of Isaac's past abuse with his dad.** I just went to my room after tonight's ep and started angry writing and then two hours later somehow had this, _I don't even know_. [Listened to "Help" by HURTS](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HggiUVgTvig) on repeat while writing, I recommend giving it a listen as you read?

Isaac’s in Scott’s bed when he finally gets home. He’s not sleeping, not at all - he’s curled up, hand gripping the corner of a pillow tight, still dressed in the clothes Scott’d last seen him in. Eyes open and blank.

He doesn’t look up when Scott closes the door.

Scott sets his helmet down (next to the one he’d bought for Isaac a few weeks back) and he scrubs his hand through his hair, shrugs out of his motorcycle jacket and lets it fall to the floor of his room. 

“Isaac - “

“Boyd’s dead.”

His words come out in a monotone, as lifeless as the boy he’s talking about, and Scott swallows hard and says, “Stiles told me.”

“I saw it.” Isaac slowly pushes himself into a sitting position, scoots until his back is against the wall and pulls his legs up towards his chest; he blinks rapidly. “Kali - the twins - they - they made him do it, they made Derek do it.”

(Stiles had said that too, and Scott had listened to the tinny quality of his voice through the phone, heard the way it shook on the word _killed_. “It wasn’t his fault,” Stiles said, because of course it wasn’t, “but - Scott, what are we gonna do? Deucalion said it’d be easier for Derek to - to kill his pack if he killed one, Scott, what’s -” he paused, and his next words barely came out louder than a whisper: “Scott, who is he gonna kill next?”)

Isaac picks at the blanket underneath him now, and he laughs, harsh and hollow.

“I guess I can’t pretend he’s just missing, like before. Not when I saw the -” he breathes out shaky. “Do you know how it feels to lose a pack member?”

Scott stands frozen in the middle of the room. He wants to say something - _I know how it feels to lose a friend_ , maybe, because - Jesus, _that’s who Boyd was_ \- but he can’t open his mouth, can’t do anything but wait for Isaac to answer his own question:

“It’s different, when they’re a wolf like you. When they’re not human like you.”

Isaac has his hands resting on his knees, palms up and fingers long but hardly frail. “When Boyd and Erica went missing, I - I didn’t want them to be dead. Obviously. Part of me didn’t think they were because I could still - it’s like I could feel them, you know? Like this, this phantom ache in my chest, I could feel it if I - if I stayed still long enough, if I concentrated hard enough. Almost like their hearts are beating inside of me.”

He looks at Scott, finally. 

“You know what I get when I try to feel out Boyd now?”

Scott’s mouth presses into a thin line, and he shakes his head.

Isaac smiles and lifts his shoulders, the picture of defeat. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

Scott takes a quiet step, and another; sits at the edge of his bed and wraps his fingers around Isaac’s ankle. 

“I’m tired of my friends dropping like flies,” Isaac says, and he sounds it: drained and bitter and done with the world and all the pain that comes with it. “Tired of the people I love being slaughtered by forces beyond my control.”

Scott lets his forehead down onto Isaac’s knee with a soft _thump_. 

“My brother. My _dad_ ,” his voice breaks and Scott tightens his hold on Isaac’s ankle. “And it’s so - I hated what he did, what he became but it’s - he was still _my dad_ , you know, he never _stopped_.”

He leans forward, sudden, and his mouth is by Scott’s ear when he says with a quiet sort of franticness, “Sometimes I have this dream, of me and him. Of the time we went to the zoo for my fifth birthday, just us. We must’ve stayed at the monkey house for _hours_ but I didn’t wanna move and he didn’t wanna make me. And he, he -” 

Isaac bunches the cloth of Scott’s shirt, rests his forehead against Scott’s temple. 

“He put me on his shoulders so I could see better, and he told me one day I was going to be too big to hold onto, that I wouldn’t fit. And I remember getting upset because I didn’t _want_ him to not hold on anymore, and then he smiled and his glasses were crooked and he said, ‘But not today,’ and it was okay, it _was_ and that’s who I think of sometimes, when I think of him. Not - not the monster that locked me in a box but the dad who _loved me_ and I can -”

His grip digs into Scott’s hair. 

“Sometimes, I can still picture it. Even when I’m not dreaming. Like if I close my eyes I can see him with his stupid, wonky glasses and a grip that didn’t terrify me yet, and I can almost feel it, and I’m so - Scott, I’m so fucking _tired_ of bad memories tainting everything and blood and death and it’s _everywhere_ , all the time, and I can’t do this anymore, I _can’t_ -”

His chest trembles with a sharp, shaking breath in and he says, “They didn’t have to kill him, they didn’t have to make _Derek do it_ , oh God -”

Scott comes forward the same moment Isaac’s legs fold out - one curls under him, the other slides off the edge of the bed - and curves an arm around Isaac’s waist; his free hand buries itself in Isaac’s hair and he blinks back a sting in his eyes and hides his face in Isaac’s shoulder.

Isaac scratches down the back of his shirt, twist it and tighten it in their grip; Scott says, “I’m sorry, I wish -”

Wish they could’ve done something, anything, to stop it, stop Kali, stop every single thing that’s gotten thrown at them since the pack came into town -

Since Gerard’s malevolence and Matt’s vendetta; the unknowable druids, and Kate’s cruel idea of a cat and mouse game that started with a too-young, manipulated Derek Hale and ended with flames licking up the frame of a family home - 

Because it’s all too much, feels like they’re fighting a losing battle, like it’s always been a losing battle, and it never stops coming. How much help can Scott be as an alpha - a _true_ alpha, no less - when the things he’s constantly fighting all seem to want the same end result: for everyone he knows to die, to turn to dust and disappear like they never existed in the first place. 

Isaac mumbles something and Scott turns his head, murmurs _what_ into Isaac’s neck; he breathes in just because he can, nose right under the cut of Isaac’s jaw and Isaac encircles his arms around Scott’s shoulders and constricts. It’s not suffocating in the least, and Scott’s thankful for it.

“I said, what’re we going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” Scott sighs; he shakes his head, hides his frown at the juncture of Isaac’s shoulder and neck. “I don’t - I don’t _know_.”

“You always know,” Isaac says. One of his arms drops, hand sliding down the bumps of Scott’s spine, palm warm and weighted and _so close_. “Tell me.”

“Isaac, I have no idea, not this time.”

He raises his head properly now, shifts just enough to study Isaac’s face: his eyes are red-rimmed and tear-filled and his cheeks are ruddy, splotchy. Scott cups his face and his brows knit together. 

He sweeps a thumb under Isaac’s eye, dragging delicately over the wetness there, and Isaac sags, yields to the touch, gaze going half-lidded with exhaustion and - and something else. Scott sniffs his runny nose, catches a whiff in the process of - oh. Of sadness, of mourning, of sorrow and fury and fear but - 

Of longing, too, soothing and warm like the crackling of a slow-burning fire built to last and the beat of Scott’s heart stumbles into itself, clumsy and confused, and skips once, twice. 

Three times, and the ends of Isaac’s mouth lift into a barely-there, unsteady smile.

“Tell me what to do,” he says, soft and insistent, and Scott _doesn’t fucking know_. Everyone wants him to lead, wants him to take charge and yeah, maybe he’ll be good at it. Maybe he’ll be great at it.

Maybe it’s what he was meant to do with the bite.

But there’s a difference between mindless optimism and the harsh cut of reality and the fact of the matter is - Scott’s _scared_. 

“I don’t want anyone else to die,” he tells Isaac, hands still framing his face, and Isaac leans into him and says, tender and intense, “ _So don’t let them_.”

Scott watches Isaac and - and he took away that woman’s pain tonight, at the hospital. Can’t help but wonder if he can take away sadness, too. All the bad shit that happens to everyone. Just take it all into himself and smother it until it goes away forever.

He’d take away his mom’s, who wears the surname of his failed excuse of a father like its a badge of survival, and he'd take away Stiles', who Scott loves more than almost anyone and anything in this whole fucking world and who _can’t lose both parents_. Allison’s, and the raw emptiness of losing a mother to a code. (Maybe Scott’s a painful memory for her too, for however well they get along now. Maybe he’d take parts of himself away, if it’d make it better for her.) Lydia’s, Danny’s - _Jackson’s_ , even though he’s fled the country because he couldn’t look any of them in the eye anymore. 

Derek’s. Because misguided decisions and burying secrets (sometimes literally) so far down that all they’ve managed to do is chip away at him bit by bit doesn’t mean he deserves to be forced to kill one of his own.

Doesn’t mean Boyd deserved to die. Or Erica. 

And Isaac’s. Isaac’s, definitely. He shouldn’t have to subsist on the good memories that just make the bad ones more unbearable, and there’s this wrench in Scott’s gut, this horrible, guilt-laced, niggling thought in the back of his mind that makes him choke back the things he can’t say out loud - 

_I’m sorry it was Boyd, but I’m so fucking relieved it wasn’t you_.

His hand slips to the graceful slope of Isaac’s neck, and he presses his thumb to the dip between Isaac’s collar bones; his other falls to Isaac’s thigh.

Scott is scared, but maybe that’s the push he needs.

“I’m not going to let anyone else die over this,” he says, eventually, and he almost believes himself.

(Maybe he just has to keep telling himself that he can do it.)

Isaac’s hand covers his. There’s a beat, and his fingers draw down lightly over Scott’s knuckles, halting and unsteady; they curl, knock against Scott’s own and Scott spreads them out slow, slides them between Isaac’s until he’s holding on firmly. 

Isaac looks down at his thigh and Scott says, “The only wolf that can take down Deucalion is an alpha, right?”

Isaac nods. His thumbnail trails along the thin skin of Scott’s wrist and a shiver runs up Scott’s back. “Sometimes I think all he wants is a fight,” Isaac says. “Like bloodshed is a sport.”

“He wants me,” Scott murmurs, and Isaac glances up quick. 

“But - Derek -”

Scott shakes his head, slow. Then he shuts his eyes. Deaton said he’d - and there was that time, on the bus, when Allison had said something about the color - he focuses inward, scrapes away all the human parts of him until all that’s left is the wolf, primal and as instinctual and necessary to who he is as breathing. 

There’s so much untapped power within, so many things he’s muted, but he lets them out now, lets them drift to the surface - not all, just enough - and when he opens his eyes, Isaac’s widen. 

“I knew it,” he whispers, awed, and the hand not holding Scott’s raises, touches Scott’s cheek reverently. “You earned it. Didn’t you?”

Scott blinks, lets the feeling slip away, and he knows without seeing for himself that his eyes are gold again; one more blink, and the animal in him quiets. He doesn’t answer, but then - Isaac doesn’t need him to.

(Isaac’s fingers brush down, and the pad of one catches Scott in the corner of his mouth - not entirely on accident, if the way Isaac tracks the movement is any indication.)

“Deucalion wants a fight,” he echoes Isaac’s words from earlier, and _he is scared_ , but he’s also never been more certain of what’s going to come:

“He wants an alpha,” Scott adds, and when he smiles, he can almost taste the acrid, bloody mess of battle, of _winning_ , on his tongue.

He smiles, and he’s not going to let one more innocent person take their last breath because of the full moon and the inherent wickedness of power corrupting.

“So I’m gonna give him one.”


End file.
